I am on Facebook, but I must tell you, my feelings about it are decidedly mixed, trending toward the negative, and here are my reasons:
1. It's like junior high. Who has more friends? Why am I not popular? A guy I know at work, when I said this, said, "You can have my friends," but why didn't they want to be friends with me in the first place? Junior high was hellish in the first place (I'm pretty sure there was a high gate at the entrance of mine, inscribed with the motto "Abandon hope, all ye who enter here"). Basically, life after junior high is just one giant renunciation of that hell. So why would I want to go there willingly?
2. I hate you and your stupid quizzes, Facebook. Not that I am at all averse to wasting time with a meaningless quiz! But when I click out to the suggested quiz and it says, basically, if you take this quiz, an army of data-miners can invade your Facebook life and start writing checks on your accounts, I say NO. There's nothing worse than tantalizing me with a quiz, then making it impossible for me to take it. It's like giving me the Cosmopolitan magazine with the "Does he really love you? Take our quiz to find out how you can know for sure!" teaser on the cover, then going inside and finding out that you have to give them your driver's license and passport as collateral. It's not worth it! Not even for a movie quiz!
3. I'm pretty sure that Facebook is responsible for the fact that the bloggers I like to read are blogging less. Tell me I'm wrong.
4. Glitchy.
5. Slow.
6. The status update as a genre flummoxes me. Which I think is hilarious, actually, since I am prepared to whine and inflate and engage in all sorts of rhetorical puffery to blog, but a single sentence seems inevitably banal. Or it crosses some sort of banality threshold beyond which I am JUST NOT WILLING TO GO, the people.
7. In conclusion, I will still be on Facebook for the opportunity to spy on my friends, and I may also occasionally offer a tiny little update from myself, and also I will use it to find people I never meant to be out of contact with but now am.
But I don't have to like it.
I use it to post and view pictures, and occasionally to play Scrabble. That's about it. Most of my objections to the site are the ones you just mentioned.
ReplyDeleteYep. I found out you can "hide" people without defriending them which takes up less of my status update space. But really Facebook is to the detriment of all that is good (blogs) and to the advantage of all that is evil (Junior High).
ReplyDeleteAgree with everything you say here.
ReplyDeleteI also have a love/ hate relationship with "The Book", but I can't bring myself to stop wasting soooo much time on it. Help!
ReplyDeleteI'm so pleased. I don't like the dreaded bebobook face thingy. I don't want to collect all these fairweather online, not really proper friends. Neither do I really care what handbag I am in this weeks fab new quiz. I had an account before and deleted it. I've given it a shot but think I'm hoovering dangerously close to that delete thing again, and I feel strangely liberated. Go blogs
ReplyDeletegot sucked in briefly. loved it for a month. but love lost its bloom so quickly. i've blogged about my reasons for breaking up with facebook. i liked hearing from the dude who went to an erasure concert with me in 11th grade, but lordy, not that much. it just wasn't worth it.
ReplyDelete8. It makes me feel bad for "ignoring" a friend request from a girl I sat next to in algebra in 8th grade. I don't care what you're up to, stranger.
ReplyDelete9. "Facebook" has become a verb. "Just facebook me when you get home and we'll be friends".
10. One student tries to add me, then it's a hoarde of teenagers just waiting for me to reject their requests.
word.
ReplyDeleteDitto!
ReplyDeletefacebook meh. I only use it for professional reasons and then barely at all. I have no patience for stupid little quizzes or games people try to drag me into. I have killed the stupid garden thing and banned its very existence. I go weeks ignoring former highschool schoolmates who add me as their friend.
ReplyDeleteIn short: I hate facebook, always did, always will. There was a brief (and it was very brief) infatuation with it for a while, but even then I really hated the thing.
Twitter is what has stolen my blogging time, if you were referring to me. I find myself at pains to write more than one sentence on anything these days.
There is a secret (and now not-so-secret) voyeur living within me. Facebook lets me explore this alternative personality.
ReplyDelete